Navigation is a fundamental cognitive function of virtually all
moving animals. Several navigation strategies require an
estimate of the current travelling direction that is updated
continuously. In the central complex of the insect brain,
multimodal cues are fused into a compass-like head direction
representation. Based on the proposed connectivity of
columnar neurons in the central complex of the desert locust
we designed a computational model to examine how these
neurons could maintain a stable representation of heading
direction and how shifts occur by optic flow signals when the
animal turns. Our proposed model architecture shows that the
activity of head direction-encoding CL1a neurons remains
stable if the activity of a second class of columnar neurons,
CL2, is exactly the same. Shifts occur via modulation of the
network connectivity. Our model can be used to deduce
testable hypotheses where data are lacking, inspiring new
avenues of experimental investigations
